Sources are whispering to us that if you thought Microsoft’s slashing the price of Kinect was a clear indication that a price cut was coming to the Xbox 360 console, don’t; because it isn’t happening, at least this holiday season.

Sources are telling us that Microsoft will do a special bundle for the Xbox 360 this holiday season, but they are not going to cut the price of the Xbox 360 hardware. The one exception to this is likely the Kinect bundled version of the Xbox 360, which will likely see a $40 price drop. Beyond that, Microsoft will hold steady with its current hardware pricing.

While some big retailers may offer some special deals that is about the only way you are going to see any real movement on the price. With Microsoft planning a new console for 2013 and still leading in sales, even with the Wii U coming Microsoft isn’t being pressured enough to have to drop the price of the hardware.

In an interesting move, Microsoft has announced that they have slashed the price of Kinect from $149.99 to $109.99. The move was confirmed by none other than Microsoft’s own Major Nelson. Word is, however, that the price drop is unique to North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific regions. Kinect will also see a price drop in Australia and New Zealand. There are no plans to adjust the price in any other regions at this time.

What we don’t know yet is what will be included with Kinect after this price drop. In the short term, retailers that we spoke with tell us that they will be selling out remaining inventory, which currently is primarily the Kinect Sensor with Kinect Adventures.

As for the future, Microsoft has not indicated that there will be any change; so we suspect that it will continue to be bundled with Kinect Adventures for the time being. The price drop is an interesting move as the company heads into the holiday season. But it could be driven by the amount of upcoming titles that will offer Kinect support to be released this holiday season that are part of the driving force behind the pricing decision.

As THQ continues to fight for survival, the company still faces very difficult decisions. This time around, it has elected to bypass the developers and instead “trim” the marketing and production teams. Sources say that 20 THQ employees were affected by this latest round of cuts.

While THQ says publically that it is necessary restructuring, employees are expected to continue to worry until at least the end of September, according to our sources. THQ has said that 10% of its workforce was redundant with the new restructuring process.

The shift is best described as a move to fund development on the key projects that the company is focused on. As part of this process we hear that some development teams at THQ could even experience some small headcount increases.

The first game (from what we are calling the new “Lean THQ”) was finally released and Darksiders II, despite the delays, scored well in reviews; but we don’t yet know how that translated into actual sales numbers yet. Our retail friends describe sales of Darksiders II as “steady,” which has to be a good sign for THQ.

It's news everyone likes to hear - price cuts, and AMD is set to slash HD 7970, HD 7950 and 7870 prices on Monday. Additionally, the company revealed that partners' interest in using HD 7970 GHz Editions for their special cards is at fault for the delay.

HD 7970 will be down $479 to $429 while HD 7950 cards will go for $349 instead of the earlier $399. HD 7870 will sell for $299 instead of $349, so it's a nice $50 cut for all these cards.

Apparently, XFX and Sapphire are expected to launch their iterations of the HD 7970 GHz Edition next week. The 7970 GHz Edition is expected to ship at 1GHz for the GPU and 6GHz for the memory, which is 75MHz and 500MHz higher, respectively, than on the HD 7970. The card comes with AMD's PowerTune that boost the card to 1050MHz.

The GHz Edition's performance is expected to bring about 10 percent overall advantage over the original HD 7970. The card's consumption isn't expected to be significantly higher, apparently due to the 28nm process improvements in TSMC, but it will be higher.

Intel is planning to cut the prices on its SSDs in August. The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactered a hell on earth rumour that Chipzilla is planning significant price reductions across its consumer SSD lineups, even in its new 330 series.

The biggest cuts will be to the 320 series. The retail version of the 300GB drive costing $464 instead of the previous $519, while the 600GB version will lose almost $200 of its retail price, falling from $1,059 to $879.

The performance 520 line will see huge cuts with the 60GB version now retailing at $99, $139 for 120GB, $199 for 180GB, $259 for 240GB, and $594 for 480GB. At those sorts of prices, SSDs should kill off traditional hard drives for all but older backups.

Intel just released the 330 family in April, it's slashing prices for these drives by a quarter. The 60GB drops to just $69, the 120GB to $104, and the 180GB to $154.

There was a time when the name Nokia was synonymous with the mobile phone world, although these days you’ll hardly hear it mentioned among top dogs. Now, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop broke some bad news for employees and investors alike, including new layoffs, closing of the company’s only plant and higher than expected Q2 2012 loss.

In an attempt to save itself, the company will cut 10,000 jobs worldwide, including the 3,700 from the its only and soon-to-be-closed plant in Salo, Finland. This brings the total number of layoffs to 40,000 since Elop was appointed CEO in 2010 - every third worker has since gotten the boot.

Nokia has lost serious ground to Apple and Samsung, and rightly so since it really has nothing to compare to, let alone lock horns, their flagship products. Nokia screwed up bad when it comes to its smartphone strategy, but it’s apparently losing in the cheaper, basic phone markets as well.

This brought about a second profit warning in only nine weeks and a warning of a worse than expected loss in Q2 2012. Although Nokia looked to its Lumia phones in hope of better times, the sales weren’t as hoped.

The company seems to be in dire need of a miracle, as the company’s stock has plummeted 70+ percent since it made a switch to Windows Mobile in February. Analysts haven’t been overly kind with their outlooks, but seem to agree that the ongoing restructuring will, if not stop, then at least break the fall somewhat.

Bugbear Entertainment, developer of the new Ridge Racer Unbounded, has admitted that they are considering addressing complaints about the game’s control scheme. However, the developer seems to feel that the problem is due to their failure to explain how the game’s braking technique operates.

The developer thinks it was partly caused by the cutting of a planned tutorial explaining the control scheme for the title. Sources tell us, however, that it apparently existed in developmental builds of the game and was taken out right before the final builds of the game.

The tutorial was cut due to the developer’s belief that it the tutorial over-explained the control scheme and seemed to get in the way. Besides, as the game developed over time and the control mechanics changed, it apparently became difficult to continue updating and revising the control tutorial. In the end, they might have been better off to have left it in the game.

Now, the developers are going back to the drawing board to see whether it would be possible to add a more interactive tutorial back into the game in a patch, or perhaps revising the control scheme altogether. While nothing has been confirmed or decided yet, Bugbear is definitely looking at the problem and wants to figure out a solution.

All of these problems with the control scheme and drifting have really had an impact on the scores, and taken what the developer intended to be a straightforward game and made it much more complex than necessary. Some believe that the problem stems from the fact that the developer was trying to incorporate realistic physics into an arcade racer.

Bugbear also seems puzzled why the focus groups that play tested the game didn’t have more trouble with the brake button, drifting, or the entire control scheme. We certainly expect that they will be taking a look at their play testing in the future.

As things stand right now, they are not sure what they are going to do; but sources tell us that we should expect them to do something pretty quickly. It is hard to predict, however, what that something might be or how long it might take for them to get this completed. The end result is that the issue needs resolved, and sales are going to be lost until it is.

Not only are HDDs following in the footsteps of economies worldwide, we now hear that WD and Seagate will cut their HDD warranties.

Seagate allegedly sent a letter to distributors, where it said that warranties will be cut on December 31, 2011. WD, on the other hand, is planning for a “policy change” on January 2, 2012.

Apparently, Seagate’s Nearline, Barracuda XT and Momentus line warranty coverages will drop from 5 to 3 years, whereas some desktop and notebook bare drivers will drop from 5 to 1 year. As for WD, its Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives’ warranties will go down from 3 to 2 years for drives shipped after the date.

In a desperate bid to flog its poorly selling TouchPad, the maker of expensive printer ink is offering $50 off. Coming less than a month after the TouchPad went on sale, the "instant rebates" are a sign that the tablets are not selling well.

Amazon.com and Office Depot have reduced prices on the 16GB and 32GB TouchPad models. The TouchPad tablet went on sale in the US on July 1, it is is due to launch in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong next month.

HP wants to release a 4G TouchPad tablet with a dual-core 1.5GHz processor for AT&T's wireless network. The original TouchPad had only Wi-Fi and a dual-core 1.2GHz Tegra processor.

Bob O'Donnell, program vice president at research firm IDC told PC World that the device feels heavy, and application support is also poor. HP was also dumb enough to think it could flog a tablet with the same ridiculous mark up as Apple when it is like an iPad 1 in the era of an iPad 2.

HP has said it is working to update the webOS operating system to fix performance issues, but has not provided a release date for the update. Android Tablets are expected to fall below $300 this Christmas.

Nintendo has confirmed that they will be slashing the price of the 3DS to $169.99 ($170) starting August 12th. This has been widely speculated for some time now, but it was not thought that the price cut would be that deep. Whispers indicate that Nintendo will be facing a loss on each 3DS unit it sells at this price and they will have to hope software sales help make up for it.

When released, the 3DS was selling for $250; and the fact that Nintendo has slashed the price to $170 Stateside confirms what we have known for quite a while now. The 3DS clearly is not selling as well as Nintendo had projected, and probably is faring much worse than they had imagined.

Japan will see a price cut on the 3DS as well, which will drop the unit to about 15,000 Yen (which translates in to about $190 US Dollars). We can also confirm that Europe will get in on the 3DS price slashing. Right now, we have not been given a specific number; but we are told that the cut will be in line with what we already know about in other regions.

Software developers continue to tell us that they are backing away from the 3DS till Nintendo can move some more units, and even then they are not sure that they will be all in on developing for the platform. As one developer told us, “Even with the price cuts, I just don’t think we are going to really ramp up our titles as we originally intended, but instead we are looking at iPhone and Android as having a better market potential just by the sheer number of units sold. We will have to wait and see, but we are starting to think that the Sony Vita might do better at grabbing consumer interest, and if that happens we will likely re-focus our efforts there on that platform. ”